Google Ads for restaurants: when it really pays (catering yes, tonight's dinner hardly ever)

Google Ads for restaurants pays when it sells a service the Google Business Profile does not cover on its own: catering, corporate events, Christmas parties, weddings, private dining, delivery with direct ordering. A click on "corporate catering london" costs £14.47, seventeen times one on "restaurants london" (£0.84), while for tonight's dinner the local pack already answers for free (DataForSEO, Google Ads UK, September 2026; CPC converted from USD at £1 = $1.3242).

So Google Ads doesn't work for a restaurant?

It works halfway.

It doesn't sell Tuesday's covers. It sells the orders for fifty people.

Look at the spread, same source:

• "restaurants near me": £0.30 a click;
• "restaurants london": £0.84;
• "restaurants covent garden": £0.94;
• "corporate catering london": £14.47.

And yet in restaurant accounts we keep finding the same problems:

• the "Smart" campaign created by the setup wizard, targeting the whole country;
• every campaign pointing to the home page;
• "conversions" that count menu views, not bookings.

And who searches for "google ads for restaurants"?

Hardly anyone: about 10 searches a month in the UK.

Few restaurateurs look for it. Below we explain why the ads rarely pay for ordinary covers, and where the money does pay.

So why listen to us?

Because we have already applied the model in this article to a local business. Contesini Consulenze has two offices in the province of Mantua, in Italy, and had never used Google Ads: first the landing page and tracking, then campaigns focused on the area around the two offices.

In seven months: 299 enquiries at €7.20 each, 68% of them workable and turned into sales conversations.

It isn't a restaurant. But the constraint is the same: every click from outside your area is a wasted click.

In this guide:

• what a click really costs in hospitality, keyword by keyword;
• the five cases where we open an account without hesitation (and when we say no);
• how to set up campaigns, pages and conversions so you don't pay for recipes and fake conversions;
• the minimum budget, worked out from real CPCs.

The organic side is in the companion article on SEO for restaurants.

Let's start with the numbers.

How much a click costs in hospitality (from £0.30 to £14.47)

In hospitality the CPC (cost per click) lives in two worlds: "where shall we eat tonight" searches cost between £0.30 and £1 a click, service searches between £2 and £15. The first are among the lowest CPCs of all the sectors we follow; the second come from people who have to organise something for twenty or a hundred guests.

Keyword	Searches/month	Average CPC	Top of page bid (high)
corporate catering london	390	£14.47	£11.71
christmas party venues london	590	£11.82	£12.72
party venues london	1,300	£3.44	£3.07
private dining london	2,900	£2.94	£3.50
wedding catering	1,900	£2.93	£3.21
catering london	2,900	£2.81	£6.34
catering manchester	590	£2.54	£2.53
pizza delivery london	210	£2.26	£2.71
function room hire manchester	210	£2.05	£2.43
takeaway delivery	1,900	£1.15	£1.47
restaurants covent garden	18,100	£0.94	£1.23
book a table	4,400	£0.85	£1.92
restaurants london	40,500	£0.84	£1.23
birthday restaurants london	2,400	£0.68	£1.09
restaurants edinburgh	27,100	£0.66	£0.97
restaurants open now	2,900	£0.62	£1.43
pizza near me	550,000	£0.49	£1.50
brunch london	22,200	£0.40	£0.81
restaurants near me	11,100,000	£0.30	£1.32

And the row that isn't in the table?

It's the most revealing of all.

"Restaurant advertising" (140 searches a month) has a CPC of £11.98.

Who buys that click? The agencies selling advertising to restaurateurs. And they pay 14 times what a click on "restaurants london" would cost.

So if someone offers you Google Ads to fill the dining room on a Tuesday, ask them one thing only: what are your CPCs?

A limit of the data: these are national Google UK averages. The real CPC in your account depends on the auction in your area and on your quality score, so measure it in the first weeks rather than trusting the planner.

Further reading: Google Ads statistics for 2026, to compare CPCs and conversion rates across sectors.

When Google Ads makes sense for a restaurant (and why there were no ads on "restaurants covent garden")

Google Ads makes sense for a restaurant when it sells something worth hundreds or thousands of pounds per enquiry that the profile cannot explain; for everyday covers, almost never. The SERP (Google's results page) confirms it: on "restaurants covent garden", searched from London on desktop, there were no ads at the top.

So what was there?

• a local pack with three Google Business Profiles: Brother Marcus with 6,200 reviews, Arcade and Harry's with 1,400 each;
• Tripadvisor, OpenTable and DesignMyNight in the "find results on" carousel;
• then guides from Covent Garden's own site, travel blogs and magazines.

Whoever is looking for somewhere to eat tonight finds the answer there.

And an ad at £0.94 saying "Restaurant in Covent Garden, book now" competes with three profiles showing stars, photos, distance and opening hours.

So the people who say "Google Ads doesn't work for a restaurant" are right?

Half right. It doesn't work for selling covers.

It works for everything with a value per enquiry of hundreds or thousands of pounds. Here are the five cases where we open an account without hesitation:

• Catering and corporate events. "Catering london" gets 2,900 searches a month and "christmas party venues london" goes from 2,400 searches in September to 260 in December: one order for fifty covers is worth a month of budget.
• Weddings, birthdays, parties. "Wedding catering" 1,900 searches a month, "party venues london" 1,300, "birthday restaurants london" 2,400, "private dining london" 2,900. Not many searches, but each one is a booking for 20-150 people.
• Delivery with direct ordering. If you have your own ordering system and want to avoid the platforms' commission. Volumes are small ("pizza delivery london" 210, "takeaway delivery" 1,900 nationally), so the campaign stays small.
• An opening or a change of ownership. The Google profile takes months to collect reviews: ads cover those months.
• Tourist areas in high season. "Restaurants covent garden" gets 9,900 searches in June and 33,100 in November: people searching from outside the area don't see the local pack of your street, they see the one for the centre.

If none of these applies to you, the budget does more spent on the profile and the photos.

We say that knowing we sell campaign management.

Further reading: when Google Ads makes sense.

Which campaign to open first (and why not the "Smart" one Google suggests)

A restaurant's first campaign is a Search campaign with radius targeting around the restaurant, and for at least two months nothing else. Not the "Smart" campaign Google offers when you open the account, not Display, not Performance Max on day one.

How wide should the radius be?

It depends on the service:

• catering: 20-30 km, because the van travels;
• a party in the dining room: 10-15 km;
• delivery: the actual delivery radius, and nothing more.

In the location settings choose "Presence" (people in the area), NOT "Presence or interest". Otherwise you pay for clicks from people reading about London in Glasgow.

The exception is the tourist area: there "interest" is useful, because whoever books a table in Covent Garden for December searches for it from home in November.

What about Performance Max?

It comes later. And only linked to the Google Business Profile, with the "store visits" and "calls" goals.

It needs real conversions to learn. Switched on in a new account it optimises for whatever it finds, meaning page views, and reports that all is well.

At Contesini we added it only after Search had gathered the first enquiries. Over seven months: 299 enquiries at €7.20 each, 68% of them workable.

Different sector. The model (local Search first, Performance Max with the profile later) is the one we would use for a restaurant with catering to sell.

How to structure the account (one campaign per service, not one per restaurant)

A restaurant's Google Ads account should be split into one campaign for each service, because each service has a different CPC, value per enquiry and landing page. For a London restaurant with a private dining room and catering, the typical structure is this:

• Catering and corporate. Keywords: "catering london", "corporate catering london", "office catering", "christmas party venues london", "team lunch". CPC £3-15, the highest budget, live from September to December and from April to June.
• Private events. "Private dining london", "party venues", "birthday restaurants", "christening venue", "graduation dinner". CPC £1-3.50.
• Delivery. Only if you have direct ordering. "Pizza delivery + area", "takeaway delivery + area". CPC £1-2.50, very tight radius, live from 6pm to 10pm.
• Generic local. "Seafood restaurant london", "japanese restaurant london", "brunch london": only in the cases above (opening, high season), otherwise paused.

Match types and negative keywords

Phrase match for service keywords ("catering london", "private dining london"). Broad match only after a month of data, with the negatives already in order.

Why so cautious?

Because broad match on day one, in hospitality, buys recipes.

"Pizza" gets 368,000 searches a month. "Pizza dough recipe", 60,500. None of those people is looking for a table.

The negative keywords to load before switching on:

• recipes: "recipe", "how to make", "dough", "homemade";
• jobs: "jobs", "waiter", "chef", "vacancies";
• business deals: "franchise", "for sale", "lease";
• misc: "menu" on its own, "free";
• the platforms' names (opentable, deliveroo, uber eats, just eat) and the towns you don't serve.

Then the search terms report every week for the first month.

What to write in the ads

• the town or area in the headline, and the service;
• a real number: "catering menus from £X a head", "private room for up to 80";
• the call asset with the restaurant's number;
• the location asset linked to the profile (it shows address and distance);
• sitelinks to the menu, photos of the room and booking.

And if you sell alcohol?

Google allows it in the UK with limits: no promotion of excessive drinking, no targeting of under-18s, and the ad may be restricted until Google has reviewed it.

Further reading: long tail and short tail keywords, how to choose.

The landing page is not the home page (whoever searched "catering london" leaves)

Each campaign's landing page should be a page dedicated to the service, not the restaurant's home page. It's the most expensive mistake we find in restaurant accounts: every campaign sends people to the home page, which tells the family's story and has an OpenTable "Book" button.

Someone who searched "catering london" and lands there closes the page.

And you've just paid £2.81 to watch them go.

One page per service, with five things:

1. the service menu with "from" prices;
2. photos of a real event you ran;
3. the capacity or delivery radius;
4. three reviews quoted with names;
5. a short form (name, date, number of guests, phone), plus a tappable number and WhatsApp.

And the booking platform's button?

Not needed here. Nobody organising a wedding books through a widget.

The form should work as a filter:

• a required "number of guests" field stops the catering campaign collecting requests for four people;
• the "date" field tells you straight away whether you can do it.

The same principle we use for B2B landing pages: fewer enquiries, more useful ones.

What to track as a conversion (15,267 "conversions" on 5,467 clicks is not a success)

A conversion, in a restaurant account, is an action that brings a real contact: a call, a form sent, a WhatsApp click, a confirmed booking. Everything else is a signal and should be set as a secondary action.

The real conversions

• Call from the ad (call asset), counted only if it lasts more than 30 seconds.
• Call from the website, with Google's forwarding number or call tracking, same threshold.
• Enquiry form submission, with the thank-you page as the event.
• Click on WhatsApp.
• Confirmed booking, imported by hand each month from the OpenTable or other booking platform dashboard if the widget does not pass the data.

The conversions that are not

The click on the "Book" button that opens the widget. Viewing the menu. Scrolling. 30 seconds on the page.

They are signals, not results. Set them as primary conversions and the algorithm optimises for them.

A theoretical risk?

Not at all.

At Valore Solare we found a month with 15,267 "conversions" against 5,467 clicks. Almost three conversions per click…

At Sunscape, in 2024, 1,487 conversions at €0.61 each. They were technical events, not enquiries.

In both cases the report looked happy on paper. And the campaign brought in nothing.

Directions requests from the profile are a separate case: they count as a conversion only for the generic local campaign, and only as a secondary one.

Further reading: how to set up Google Analytics to count enquiries, not visits.

The minimum budget, worked out from real CPCs (from £10 a day, for three months)

The minimum Google Ads budget for a restaurant is about £10 a day for private events and generic local and £15-20 a day for catering, held for at least three months. The sums are done for each service separately, starting from the real CPC.

Catering in London: £600 a month, 6-11 enquiries

CPC: £2.81 on "catering london". With a 3% conversion rate (one enquiry every 33 clicks, realistic for a page with a form and prices) an enquiry costs about £94; at 5% about £56.

With £20 a day, £600 a month, you buy around 210 clicks and get 6-11 enquiries.

Is it worth it?

Do the sums: if one in three becomes an order for 40 people at £35 a head, that month's budget is paid back several times.

On "corporate catering london", at £14.47, the same budget buys about 40 clicks and one or two enquiries: if that's your market, the budget has to be higher. And below £15 a day the campaign doesn't collect enough clicks to be read.

Private events: £300 a month, around 5 enquiries

Average CPC between £2 and £3.50, say £3. At a 5% conversion rate an enquiry costs £60. With £10 a day, £300 a month: about 100 clicks and around 5 enquiries for parties, private dining and weddings.

Generic local: we keep it paused (almost always)

CPC £0.84 on "restaurants london". At 5% a booking costs about £17; at 10%, possible if the page has the widget at the top, about £8. With £10 a day, around 12 clicks and roughly one booking a day.

On an average bill it can pay for itself.

So why pause it?

Because the local pack brings the same bookings for free. We switch it on only for openings and the high season.

The first two months cost more (always)

The cost per enquiry at the start is always higher than these sums.

• At Valore Solare the first month produced 9 enquiries at €212 each; the average cost over eleven months fell to €70.78.
• At Macropix the cost per enquiry went from €94 in 2024 to €39.44 in 2025, on the same account.

The minimum budget has to be held for at least three months. Or you learn nothing.

Further reading: the benefits of Google Ads and how to measure them.

Seasonality and hours: when to switch on and when to switch off (Christmas parties are won in September)

In hospitality demand changes a lot from month to month: "christmas party venues london" gets 2,400 searches in September, 1,600 in October, 720 in November and 260 in December, then 210-320 until June. The budget follows these curves, not the yearly average.

The other curves to watch:

• "wedding catering": 2,900 in September and 2,400 in October and January, when people are planning, against 1,300 in December;
• "restaurants covent garden": 33,100 in November against 9,900 in June;
• "brunch london": 27,100 in October and November, 18,100 from June to August.

A Christmas party campaign spent entirely in September and October is worth three times the same amount spread across the year. By December the parties are already booked.

What about hours?

• Generic local and delivery: live only when someone can answer the phone or take the order, usually 11am-2pm and 6pm-10pm.
• Catering and events: the opposite, office hours. Whoever organises the work Christmas party does it from their desk.

And with no ad schedule at all?

You pay for clicks at three in the morning from people who will never book.

The mistakes we find in restaurant accounts (the Leeds restaurant paying for clicks from Brighton)

The mistakes in restaurants' Google Ads accounts are almost always the same seven, and several come from Google's setup wizard:

• The "Smart" campaign created by the setup wizard, targeting the whole "United Kingdom" with keywords suggested by Google: a restaurant in Leeds paying for clicks from Brighton.
• Conversion set on page views or on the widget click: the report says 300 conversions, the restaurant hasn't seen a single extra booking.
• Broad match without negatives: half the spend on "carbonara recipe" and "waiter jobs".
• Every campaign pointing to the home page.
• No ad schedule and no seasonality: the same budget in November and in August.
• Performance Max as the first and only campaign, with no profile linked.
• Remarketing to people who viewed the menu: in hospitality the lists are too small to be useful, and the cost of managing them outweighs the return. It's only worth it for catering and events, where someone who asked for a quote decides over weeks.

Further reading: how to do remarketing when the list is small.

Google Ads or SEO? (covers to SEO, catering to ads)

For everyday covers you need SEO, for high-value services Google Ads. A restaurant's SEO is the Google Business Profile, reviews, a small and consistent website, pages by area and occasion: we covered it with SERP data in SEO for restaurants.

And catering?

Catering or a wedding doesn't come from the local pack. And pages built for "catering london" take months to rank against specialist caterers.

The two also help each other more than it seems:

• the service pages built for the campaigns are the same ones that then rank organically;
• the Google Ads search terms report is the most precise keyword research a restaurant can have: it tells you which words people use to look for your service in your town, which no tool returns for volumes this small.

The general reasoning is in SEO and Google Ads together.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start (with last year's enquiries in hand)

Not £0.84 for a cover, but £2.81 for a catering order for 40 people.

Not the "Smart" campaign, but a radius-targeted Search campaign.

Not the home page, but a page for every service.

Not menu views, but calls, forms and bookings.

Now, two concrete things.

One: take the last year of catering, party and corporate dinner requests you received by phone or email. Count how many there were and how much they were worth on average.

Two: if there are more than one a month and each is worth more than £500, you have a service Google Ads can multiply. Build the page for that service with prices and photos and open a single radius-targeted Search campaign, with £15 a day for three months. If there are fewer, the money works harder on the profile.

If you want to look at the numbers together, book a strategy consultation.

See you next time!